Cultural Passport for December 1st

§ December 1st, 2008 § Filed under Cultural Passport, Visual Diary

Yura Lee

My visit to the MOMA, an unexpected turn of events.
My initial determination was to go straight to the Van Gogh Exhibit. Seeing as how I had to wait an hour for the standby line to open (I didn’t know that I needed a TIMED ticket to see the Van Gogh show, and it was apparently all sold out anyway) I had a lot of time to just walk around. Soon, I found myself at the Printed Picture Gallery that consisted of a collection of prints that chronicled the evolution of print throughout history.

The image above was a from a type of print called Mezzotint in which the artist polishes portions of a roughened copper plate to varying degrees to create areas of white and middle tones in a field of velvety black. This creates an aspect that parallels that of a real photograph because even in the print, varying degrees of light can be seen on different sections of the print (for example, light is reflected in the armor). Although my initial plan was to only see the Van Gogh exhibit, the time that was allotted to me made me explore all the exhibits that I would originally not have ventured to explore. Especially this Printed Picture Gallery enabled me to appreciate the evolution of print and how the earlier forms paved the way for the Digital Print Era that we live in today.